


A FIGHTING GUIDE TO WANTING YOUR COMMANDER

by spicyshimmy



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Boxing & Fisticuffs, M/M, Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-16
Updated: 2012-04-16
Packaged: 2017-11-03 18:48:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/384662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spicyshimmy/pseuds/spicyshimmy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Too many thoughts about that fight with James in the shuttle bay, encouraged by Mo/Cuddlingthecthulhu. How the romance could've gone, if there was one. <i>It’d been years since Shepard was in a proper fistfight.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	A FIGHTING GUIDE TO WANTING YOUR COMMANDER

I.

It’d been years since Shepard was in a proper fistfight.

Most of the action he saw these days went down with gunfire, heading back on the shuttle with his ears ringing late into the night. Punching a husk in the face with his elbow wasn’t the same as putting his dukes up; there was nothing antiquated about it, nothing like a dance at all. It was just killing. It was just cleaning up and no matter how sore it left Shepard’s muscles after, it wasn’t the same strain.

It’d been years—and Shepard thought he’d done all right, all things considered. He had James on his back on the floor by the end of it, anyway, and for somebody who wasn’t that young anymore, for somebody who _didn’t_ spend all his extra time doing chin-ups on an expensive piece of Normandy equipment, for somebody who was coming off close to six months of glorified house arrest, Shepard even allowed that voice in the back of his head—the one that sounded a lot like Anderson—to say, _you did good, kid_.

‘You did good,’ Shepard told James over dinner, leaving off the kid part.

‘Yeah, people _always_ say that when you lose,’ James replied.

They didn’t. They said a whole lot of other things. And, Shepard thought when he saw the shadow jump in the look James threw him, James knew it too. That he wasn’t proud of the lie.

II.

It hadn’t been years since Shepard’s back was against the wall.

Shepard’s back was _always_ against the wall.

But the proverbial situation was one thing. The literal was another. The wall was damn _hard_ and Shepard didn’t know what gave less, skin or skin-grafts or muscle, bone or cybernetics. It hurt, with a dizzy clarity he only got when he’d gone down behind cover, when something big and mean and slow was firing on him—when he was looking for a weak spot that maybe, _maybe_ , wasn’t going to be there.

Only it wasn’t like that. James pinned him to the wall and not the floor and the whole thing, every white-hot second of it, was payback, round two, vertical instead of horizontal, all part of how Shepard’s own personal history kept repeating itself, usually inside-out or even upside-down.

There were going to be bruises on his back in the morning. His arms, too, from the way James was holding on.

Shepard knew what it was like—to hold on. To be grateful for muscle, something solid, something he could close his fingers around.

When James closed his mouth in on Shepard’s, a _shit_ hissed between their lips, nobody won. Shepard hated to say it was just like the fighting, proverbial or literal. It was another phase or _something_ , and there was so much teeth, and they both wanted it so bad there was blood.

III.

James had years to figure all of this stuff out.

Shepard sat on the edge of his bed, hard like everything else—like James’s chest, like the wall, like a one-two punch. At least one thing was softer than it looked.

‘Nothing’s too hard for me,’ James had said in the mess, in passing, after Shepard brought the bed into the equation.

Looking up was James’s version of a salute. And he wore his shadows like some people wore armor: as good as they looked in it, they’d look even better when they were out.

‘Maybe I oughta soften it up a little,’ James said, one knee on the mattress, one hand on Shepard’s thigh. His knuckles were bruised, but they weren’t all balled up. He didn’t tuck his thumb away to keep it safe and, Shepard thought when he saw the shadow jump in the look James didn’t throw him, it was like a fist to the gut that never came.

It was a hot round, though, a full clip emptied into his stomach.

James rubbed the inside of Shepard’s thigh with a callused finger and Shepard did what he could to say it was welcome there, more than all right, better than okay. There was a scar on his throat from something—who could tell anymore?—and he let James see it with lips that were scarred already. 

**END**


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